Eolas+ Parasitic Innovation
LMAO. For a firm that likes to pretend it’s innovative, Eolas has a lot of lawyers and mentions of litigation in its About page.
The History and Future of Warfare
I’ve been thinking about Lexington Green’s post asking for help putting together a presentation on the history of warfare. Here’s the framework I’ve thrown together. My focus was on incorporating the market and information (both get lost in most traditional readings of the history of warfare). Feedback’s appreciated.
Of course, this needs fleshing out, but the call was for an outline, so here goes:
The history of warfare looks something like this cycle that repeats itself within the governance market – between an insurgent governance platform and the dominant platform of the time. Victory is gauged by market-share of each platform.
- Tribe vs. Tribe
- Tribe vs. State
- State vs State
- Marked by the invention of the nuke.
- Network vs State
- Where we are now. Networks are essentially information empowered tribes.
- Network vs. Network
- When the nation-state collapses into its component resilient communities and combats the networks that won.
- Insurgencies and private military corporations act as governance platforms.
- Small-Scale Networks vs Network
- Advanced information flows decreases mass requirements and increases decentralization.
- Trend continues until post-human age.
- Small-Scale Network vs Small-Scale Network
- Individual vs. Small-Scale Network
- Individual vs. Individual
- Post-human vs. Individual
- When the difference between man and machine is negligible.
- ? vs Post-Human
*Acceleration really takes off when the network barrier is broken.
*Technology is a type of information.
Fixing the USPS
Looks like the USPS is scrambling for big ideas on how to keep the business afloat. Hopefully they aren’t just talking to these guys.
Real big idea solutions for the USPS involve scanners.
Defensive Epidemic Networks
Chris Albon, the goto guy on warfare and health, as an interesting post on his brand new Conflict Health.
In it he touches on the idea that the self-replicating nature of epidemics can act as a kind of fortification (in that attacking the infected node results in failure). The only way to make this approach work (as the defender) is to be immune to the epidemic. Without this control, the biological weapon becomes all-consuming.
In terms of information warfare, this is a node that processes information, hacks it to a predefined algorithm (say replace every mention of any city location with “istanbul”), and transmits it. Not a search crawler, but a search processor that circulates this new, hacked information stream. Only the operator of the processor knows what the original signal was. This is an advantage.
